Tag Archives: finance

Peter Torelli had $2000 saved when he entered college. He knew that it wouldn’t last long, so he had to be careful about his spending. He switched to using a credit card in order to have a record of his purchases and reconciled his accounts every month. It became a habit that he kept for a long time. A really long time.

Peter now has 20 years of financial data, and the way he’s logged his data has followed larger technological trends. Starting with manually logging transactions in Quattro Pro and storing his data on floppy disks, his data now resides on Quicken’s servers. These changes have brought better security with better backups, but also uncertainty about the ownership of his data and lack of flexibility to move his information elsewhere because of proprietary data formats.

One of the surprising findings is how many memories flooded back when he reviewed past transactions. Both memories and transactions are tied to places. A simple line item can trigger a forgotten moment with an out-of-touch friend. When Peter’s spending trends are displayed on a multi-year timeline, it’s not just a representation of his finances, but the chapters of his life as well.

There are many more great insights from Peter’s talk at the Quantified Self San Francisco meetup in April:

You can read more about Peter’s projects on his website. For more on this topic, here’s a great roundup of QS projects related to money.

Catha Mullen has a long history with tracking, primarily from her experience as an elite-level distance runner. In this talk, presented at the Bay Area QS Meetup, she describes how tracking and data analysis helped her understand and improve her financial health.

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Yesterday was the first day in a month that I handled cash. For weeks everything I’ve purchased and paid for has been handled by digital means. Debit cards, direct debits and deposits, internet purchases – it’s all 1′s and 0′s flowing through the tubes, and it’s makes my life very easy. However, now that the flow of money in and out of my life is easier, I have to find new ways of being aware of what’s happening to the money. I’ve gathered up a few examples of QS projects, show&tell talks and articles related to money – please feel free to share your own favorites. -Ernesto

Show&Tell Videos

Amaan Penang: Making Data-Driven Financial DecisionsAmaan Penang was faced with a life change when he moved from Texas to California to start a new job. While preparing for the move he started to examine his financial health and was surprised by what he didn’t understand about his spending and income. Using the popular financial tracking software, Mint, he started to examine his historical spending. In this talk Amaaan explains what he learned and how he was surprised to find out how this data opened up the doors to exploration and better financial health.

Natty Hoffman: The Enlightened Consumer
Natty had a large amount of financial data, over 14 years of expenses and spending, that she was accessing from credit card and bank statements. Because of her work as a consultant she was experiences with understanding and reconciling her various accounts and reimbursements. It wasn’t until attending a QS meetup in Boston that she realized that there was more to her data than just historical financial documents,

“I didn’t really think much about this data until I went to a Quantified Self meetup a few months ago. And then I said to myself ‘You know, I have some pretty interesting data about myself as a consumer and I wonder what I’m going to find out.”

Natty started exploring her data by looking back at the last two years to better understand the where her money was going based on a broad categorization scheme. But, she didn’t stop there. She went on to explore exactly where she was spending her money and found that she was a customer of over 300 different businesses over the two years she examined. Intrigued by the the companies she frequented she went deeper and started to see how she did as a consumer and if her spending behavior matched her personal ideals.

Matic Bitenc: Manual Finance Tracking
Outside the US there aren’t many good options for automatically tracking personal finances. Matic and his partners created Toshl Finance, an application for manually tracking how he was spending his money. In this talk Matic describes what he learned about his expenses and lifestyle by using a simple tag-based system and easy to understand visualizations.

Examples of Personal Finance Tracking

Tracking, Classifying, and Comparing Expenses by Karsten W.
We featured this very interesting tracking project in 2012 when Karsten embarked on a experiment to track his spending via a simple Twitter tool. Not satisfied with just tracking, he also categorized and compared his spending habits to what a typical person in his country (Germany) spent in different categories.

The Quantified Self Movement Reaches Personal FinanceKey Quote: “Personal finance tools as they evolve will take this technology much farther. GPS-based navigational systems have both improved and become more ubiquitous as raw data have become more available and the cost for both devices and services has dropped. So too will personal finance apps begin to follow us around. They’ll live in our phones or on our wrists, pulling in real-time data to help us take control of our own short-term liquidity and solvency needs and long-term retirement goals.”

What Health and Finance Can Learn From the Quantified Self Movement and Each Other.Key Quote: “Few domains of life are as quantified as your financial self — you have your credit score, savings and checking balances, 401Ks, stocks, bonds, funds and more aided by countless apps, reports and plans provided by banks, employers and financial advisors all available online, on the phone, in person and at your local ATM.”

Banking on you — how wearable tech could change finance.Key Quote: “Historically, banks have been some of the richest repositories of data — but also the least likely to do something innovative with it. This is partly due to regulation, but mostly due to a self-limiting mindset prevailing in the banking industry. Till now, consumers have accepted this status quo, but not for much longer. As they find their ‘quantified selves’ no doubt their demand for insights into their finances will increase.”

Financial Wearables – Part 1: Can high-tech wearables solve underserved people’s financial problems?Key Quote: “Managing money in cash is time consuming—time to get cash, calculate it, record your every transaction. Banks do most of those actions, but do not teach you how to spend better and save money at the same time. The potential power of wearables is not in presenting you with “transactional information” about how many steps you took on a given day, but rather in showing how you can improve those steps over time with alerts, recommendations and visual elements. Banks could use the “wearables” power to incentivize users to better their financial health, deliver liquidity management tools and foster strong banking relationships and maximizing customers’ assets instead of their fees. It not only helps individuals but the bank as well.”

YOUR MONEY-Financial obsessives track every penny, every minuteKey Quote: “Australian academics Ken Cheng and Megan Oaten of Sydney’s Macquarie University once had volunteers write down every single purchase for four months, which led to marked improvement in their financial lives. They also found that positive financial habits started bleeding into other areas, with the volunteers improving their behavior in everything from house cleaning to exercising.”

‘Quantified Self’ Movement Now Lets You Track Your Money TooKey Quote: “Cozy Cloud co-founder Frank Rousseau was originally inspired to invent the self-hostable personal cloud platform because he wanted an open source alternative to Mint.com, he told us earlier this year. But the hard part is that most banks don’t provide APIs to help users get their data out of the banks, according to the project website. To do this, Open Bank Manager is relying on a tool called Weboob (WeB Outside Of Browser) to scape data from banking sites.”

Amaan Penang was faced with a life change when he moved from Texas to California to start a new job. While preparing for the move he started to examine his financial health and was surprised by what he didn’t understand about his spending and income. Using the popular financial tracking software, Mint, he started to examine his historical spending. In this talk, presented at the Silicon Valley Quantified Self meetup group, Amaaan explains how he tracks his data, crunches the numbers, and finds “interesting patterns” in his data.

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